


Deathbat

by karmalite



Category: Avenged Sevenfold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-11 04:56:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2054472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karmalite/pseuds/karmalite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma would (literally) cross oceans for the boys in Avenged Sevenfold, but when something is unleashed in her that throws her into a mysterious, confusing and dangerous world, they are the only ones that she can turn to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deathbat

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a re-draft of something I wrote a few years ago. I liked the idea, but it was horribly written, so I tried to tackle it here. And...well, I'm trying to get out of the habit of brutally critiquing my own writing in the author's notes, so just read for yourself, and I hope you find it alright.
> 
> XxKarmaxX

They were amazing, and _right there_.

For the longest time, I couldn't decide exactly what drew me to them. It hadn't helped that nobody around me could understand either.

But in the second row, just too far to reach out to the stage, it hit me like a ton of bricks and welled up in my stomach until I was screaming at the top of my lungs.

Matt's deep green eyes reached back, scanning the crowd, and I could have sworn that, just for a moment, they caught on to me. Just a moment was enough. My mind forced my body into action. I shoved past bodies, pried people apart; I had to get to the front.

My head hit the muscular forearm of a stranger almost twice the height of me and I crashed onto my tailbone as feet squirmed around me. People filed in to where I had been standing, kicking me forward onto my hands and knees. It actually made things easier. I crawled through legs, my arms shielding me from jumpers. By the time the barrier was in front of me, my face was bruised and cut. But I was there.

I reached up to the top of the barrier and pulled myself up. As my vision unclouded and orientated back to the world of regular height, I found a pair of deep green eyes on me. Fixed on me. It could have been for the show that I just put on, my lip bleeding as it was. A smirk came over him, venomous but euphoric. It was perfectly possible that he could be staring into space, but something- if only my deprived imagination- told me that it was purposeful, that it was focused.

Either way, I desperately wanted to reach out for him, maybe to confirm if he was actually acknowledging me, maybe just because it seemed like something you do, but something paralyzed me. Whether it was admiration, excitement, or just plainly being starstruck, every time I tried to reach out, it was as if something was pulling me back.

 _His stare_. His eyes felt like they were scanning through every detail in my mind. Of course my body would act up, would fall out of order. I hadn't had much to drink or eat today- a rookie mistake- and the speakers were blowing out every coherent thought that I could muster. Now that I was here, practically _on front_ of five of my biggest heroes, and one seemed to be actually paying attention to me, _nothing_ felt real.

But, the chunky, rough hands gripping my waist and shoulders and the disappearing image of the stage and the crowd on front of me definitely was real. It took a while for me to process any of this information. Before I could think straight, I found myself being hauled into the main venue and into a small, windowless room. Removed from the graffiti-stricken walls outside, nothing about this room clued you in to the fact that it was in a concert venue. The four walls were a dirty cream colour and the only thing in it was a four seating table with a clipboard and a bullpoint pen on it.

They sat me at one end of the table and took their seats at the other. One was a heavily packed man with a triple chin and a bald head. The other was a tall woman with a red streak in the front of her hair and muscles threatening to break from her uniform.

"Do you have any idea why we've brought you in here?" Triple-Chin asked.

I shook my head and crossed my arms, looking to the side of them both. _I was so close to them_.

They exchanged unmotivated glances. "What age are you, madam?" the woman asked.

"Fifteen," I told them. _Almost exactly 15 years younger than Matt._

"Right," she said, nodding microscopically. "Are your parents, or anybody else you can trust over the age of eighteen, at hand to pick you up?"

My eyes popped open wide. "What?" I demanded.

"I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to leave after we're done here," the man explained. "It's honestly for your own safety. Unless there's something you want to confess, of course." He leaned forward, his blue eyes bulging.

I shook my head. "I don't understand."

"We realise that this is confusing, but people try to bear with us," she said, stretching her arm along the table towards me. "We just need a contact number for your parents so that we can be sure you'll be safe."

I pursed my lips together, gaze falling to the table. "My parents live in the UK." The words fell from my lips the way that a sack of flour might fall from a balcony.

"Oh?" she asked. She picked up the clipboard and pen. "And who are you staying with, then?"

I shook my head and rested my forehead on the palm of my hand. "Some friends," I said quietly.

Her lips fell into a thin, flat line as she looked at me. She set down the clipboard. "Are your parents aware that you're here?"

I stayed perfectly still for a moment, and then my head shook almost on its own will.

The woman's mouth fell open and the two exchanged baffled glances. An unsettling silence fell over the room. "We'll deal with that matter afterwards, okay?" the man asked.

I nodded my head, since it wasn't like I had a choice in the matter. The woman picked up the clipboard and looked through the pages attached. "Are you aware of what you just experienced?" she read in monotone.

My eyebrows knitted together. I sat forward and spread my hands out on the table. "What do you mean?" I asked. "When?"

"Back when you were at the front," the man told me.

My eyes drifted out of focus. "No," I decided, shaking my head.

"Alright," she said, scribbling something down with the pen. "And could you tell me a little bit about what you were feeling back there?"

I looked her straight in the eye. "I...I don't know what you're talking about."

"Before we pulled you away," he said, a little louder and blunter this time, "how did you feel?"

I raised my fingertips to my forehead and rested my elbow on the desk. "...Really happy, I guess." I looked at the man through my fingers. "It's my first time seeing Avenged Sevenfold, and they're one of my favourite b-"

"Right, of course," the woman said. "Was there anything else that you could feel? Anything unexpected?"

"I couldn't move," I said after a moment, resting my palms on the table.

She nodded and started writing again. This time the room was silent for at least a minute.

"And when did this begin?" she asked. "What do you think triggered it?" The use of the word 'trigger' made me imagine someone shooting a tranquilizer at me from back somewhere in the crowd.

"I...it was when I first got to the front, I-"

Their waists suddenly began to beep. The woman reached down to a chunky black box with a screen attached to her belt. She looked up at me. "Please wait here."

They left the room, leaving me alone. Slowly, I began to feel the sting from the cut on my lip for the first time. I reached my hand up to it; it wasn't bleeding anymore, but it still hurt like hell. The adrenaline began to wear off, giving way to aching bones and sharp, shooting pains all over me.  _What the hell was I thinking?_

A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. I kept staring forward. Whoever it was, they should have been told that this room was occupied. The door opened despite my silence.

"Can I see you for a moment?"

His voice made me turn around. For one, it seemed to bounce off the walls and echo around the room in a dreamlike fashion. Second, he sounded like- _no_.

The man standing in the doorway was two thirds of the height of it. His hair just reached to his neck and came off in little flicks of black. At the back, his hair visably stuck up. He was wearing a t-shirt with a colourless woman on it. Most of it was covered up with a leather jacket that had the collar turned down. My mouth gaped open. _No..._

He smiled softly as he looked at me, the look in his eyes acknowledging my shock. "We don't have much time," he said, his voice echoing again. He slowly reached his hand out. I forced myself up to take it. He pulled me out of the room and back into the seemingly never-ending corridor. The walls were littered with graffiti and posters advertising gigs and tours.

As we walked, I constantly turned my head just to make sure that nobody was behind us.

He led me to the venue bathroom. The room was surprisingly well-lit and shined white. There were three cubicles against one wall and sinks and mirrors against the other one. I had to assume that it was the girl's bathroom for the lack of urinals, but I couldn't really know.

"You probably have some questions," he said. My mouth hadn't closed the whole way over here. "We'll explain everything soon. I want to show you something." His voice didn't seem to bounce off the walls as much here.

He took my hand and pulled me gently over to the mirror. His figure didn't reflect.

I turned around in a reflexive motion. The last few days had been insane; I didn't put it past me to hallucinate this whole thing. I let my eyes rest on him, still here, still alive. (Or, still Jimmy at least)

He looked down at me and smiled. I let the breath that I had been holding out and turned back to the mirror.

For the first time, I noticed how badly beaten I was. Brown bruises were dotted around my face, like brown water paint. The cut that just touched my lips looked like it could start bleeding at any moment. The red scratches along the bridge of my noise were so perfectly parrellel to one another that they looked purposeful. My red-brown hair stuck up at the back and dirt was strung through it.

"Okay," he said. "I want you to think about what happened before at the barrier. Just really put yourself in that position again."

I tried. It was bizarre to think about- how pumped up I was, how desperate I was to get to the front. I could have gotten myself killed, but at the same time- it was nice to be so careless.

"Do you see that?" he asked. I looked closely, and shook my head. "Look at your eyes."

"...Holy crap."

Against my hazel eyes, it was almost impossible to see. But it was there. Bat wings spread out across my iris from an open-mouthed skull. The Deathbat symbol.

"Matt texted me about you a little bit after you got taken away," he explained. Apparently he saw it on you whilst you were in the crowd. Do you have any idea what this means?"

Everybody kept asking me that today, in different words. My answer was the same. "No," I told him.

He chuckled. "I thought you wouldn't," he said. "Listen." He put his hands on my shoulder and turned me around to face him. "We will explain everything- don't you worry. But we need you to stick with us until we can do that. We can only be completely honest with you if we can trust you, alright?" His gaze was intense and seemed to be searching my face for any minute movements, any sign of wavering.

I nodded and swallowed. "Alright." My voice broke into a higher pitch.

"Alright," he said. He lifted one hand off my shoulder and let the other drift to my upper arm. "This probably isn't the best place to-"

The bathroom door slammed violently against its hinges.

Jimmy pushed past me to get into the cubicle closest to the wall. I followed suit and jumped into the middle cubicle, my adrenaline serving as rocket fuel.

"Hello?" Three-Chins.

"We know you're in here."

I reached down and put my hand through the crack at the bottom between cubicles. His larger, heavily tattooed hand covered it, thrusting something into my grasp. I pulled my hand back.

It was a piece of paper. _Where did he have room to keep a notepad?_

'Go out. I have a plan,' was scrawled on it.

It sounded like sheer suicide. How could I trust someone who I had practically just met with my fate, and just trust that whatever he was cooking up in there could save me? Especially a man who I thought was  _dead_?

But I did. I did trust him. I drew back the lock, and the security guards twisted at the sound. It might have been because it was  _him_ , or because of the strange faith that was brewing, after what I had seen. I believed.

Their eyes were burning with contempt and anger. I should have been scared. I should have been immobilised by adrenaline and guilt. But instead, my mind couldn't move away from the image of the Deathbat. How otherworldly it seemed when the wings fluttered against my eyes, and that was only seeing  _myself_. I could only imagine how bizarre, how utterly indescribable it must have seemed to someone who hadn't looked into those eyes thousands of times.

 _They_  should have been scared.

They walked towards me in a calm manner, eyes still locked on me as if they were holding me in place just by their eye contact. I met them halfway, taking slow and steady steps, slowly raising my arms in surrender.

And when I was just in front of them- I promptly slammed them against the back wall.

A cubicle unlocked and Jimmy took my hand, pulling me so effortlessly that I was practically floating. The toilet door passed by me like the world passed by you when you looked out of a train window. The corridor ahead of us began to grow shorter and shorter as we ran.

We crashed through the back door and sprinted away from the venue. The carpark we were in was mostly empty, except for a few cars and a bus that had 'Avenged Sevenfold' on it against a black backdrop, with a deathbat next to it in the style of Waking The Fallen.

We sped across the large patch of grass that surrounded the car park and collapsed in an alleyway between two blocks of flats. (Or, apartments.)

"Do you think that's them gone?" Soon after I'd spoken, my voice began to sound distance to me. I sounded confident and perhaps a little authoritive.

"Yeah, I think so," he said, but I barely registered it.

I had just assaulted fully trained, adult security guards who were built like brick houses. I was a 5"5 teenage girl who screamed every time she stubbed her toe.

"What the hell did I just do and how did I do it?" I blurted out.

Jimmy looked at me for a moment. The slightest of grins creeped up on his face. "I have some explaining to do, don't I?"

I nodded.

He looked above him and around him before finally settling on me.

"Not the best place, but it'll have to do," he said. He leaned forward, rubbing his cheeks with his hands. "The deathbat symbol in your eyes signals a kind of transformation. To put it really simply- you get more energy, become more impulsive and become insanely determined. Once you set your mind on something, you're prepared to do anything to get it- even if you have to be stronger, or faster, or anything that your normal body isn't equipped for."

"...So, wait," I said, lying my palms out flat on front of me. "I can just make myself stronger like that?"

Jimmy nodded.

"So...I could do anything, really, couldn't I?"

"Not everything," he told me. "You can't do anything past the limits of your human body." He said 'human' like he was removed from them. "But...you're talking, the point where a professional bodybuilder goes, 'Nope, sorry. Too heavy'."

I stared at him for a moment whilst my mind processed everything. "But...why?"

He let out an exasperated laugh. "The answer to that question is so complicated that we'll need some more mouths to explain it," he said.

I nodded and let my eyes trail to the ground. There were a few moments of silence where all that could be heard were Jimmy's ragged breath and the music emanating from the building we had just fled.

"I was eleven when you died," I piped up. "I balled my eyes out for two straight days."

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I really...I didn't want to upset someone. I guess that's a weird thing to say when you're talking about death, but...I didn't want you to cry."

"No," I said, a grin catching like fire. "I'm happy. I'm so fucking happy." A tear threatened to roll down my cheek.

I looked up at him. "Can I get a hug?" He nodded with a huge smile on his face. I threw my arms around him and he leaned in.

My fucking hero.


End file.
